Freelance Writer

Back Bay Books: The 2015 Boston Book Festival

This post is the very definition of “long-overdue”–the 2015 BBF took place on October 24th, which scientific sources inform me was three and a half weeks ago. Never mind. I’m in grad school, so it’s a minor miracle when I’m able to post at all.

I went to the Boston Book Festival chiefly to get a feel for the small-press literary scene in Massachusetts. To that end, I bought a fat stack of local literary journals. Behold!

Whether owning said journals will lead to future publishing success is anyone’s guess. When I lived in Michigan, I wound up publishing pieces with outfits based in Albany and Canada, so, you know. There’s not really a correlation between where you live and which periodicals accept you.

Anywho, here’s some other stuff I saw:

Regis Philbin’s autobiography, which is called How I Got This Way. The title kind of makes it sound like he’s going to show you the scars he got in ‘Nam, or reveal the source of his mounting psychosis. Actually, my research revealed that Philbin suffers from nothing more catastrophic than gastric reflux disease. So I’m guessing he got “this way” by drinking too much coffee or something.

Great Grandmother Goose, an out-of-print 1978 collection of…nursery rhymes, presumably. The Amazon page for the book lacks any description of its contents. If I’m honest, the only reason I took a picture of this book was so I could tell you a story about my friend’s co-worker, whose wife left him and subsequently changed her name to Grandma Goose. As in, first name Grandma, last name Goose. That’s the name that will be on her death certificate someday. Wild, huh?

What used book sale would be complete with a healthy does of horse porn? I remember my classmates devouring books like these when I was a tyke. I never read Pony on the Porch or Mare in the Meadow, so I had no concept of how intense their plots where until just now. The first one is apparently about a little girl trying to save a show horse whose owner is literally working it to death; the second is about two kids trying to convince their friend not to sell her horse, whom she doesn’t give a shit about. Move over, War Horse–there’s a new (old) horse-based drama in town!

You can pretty much glean all you need to know about Gothic Dreams: Dystopia from the spine, but just in case you’re curious, I’ll give you the quote from the back cover:

You want fear? I’m fear. You want chaos? I’m the chaos. You want a beginning? I am the new beginning.

Whoa, dude. Gothic Dreams is exactly as gothic as the cover font implies.

Last, but not least, we have this bracing jaunt through the world of Corporate Dividend Policy. While the subject matter may seem dull, there are any number of reasons to brush up on dividends and their application within the sphere of corporate zzzzzzzz….